Cultural Assistant

As a cultural assistant, I got to help in as many orientation week activities – with the main focus on the Trent International activities. In late August, I would meet the entire team of Cultural Assistants and facilitators to get to know each other. From there, we would learn about strategies to help international students specifically as they moved to a new country – many of whom came to Canada for the first time. The next day, we would meet all the other Orientation Week facilitators and leaders to do the required training. This training was done throughout the week, and covered topics such as consent, team building, emergency procedures, team building exercises, and knowing whom to contact in different scenarios. Knowing this information ensured that we could best protect the first-year students, and make sure that they were having fun in a safe environment. Additionally, we all head to learn cheers based on the college – in my case, it was Trent International and the college I was helping out – we were in. These cheers allowed not only our team to be hyped up for the day, but also get our students even more excited for the day.

In my first and third year as a Cultural Assistant, we got to help out with the airport pickup. This meant that we got to go to the Toronto Pearson Airport to collect the incoming students who signed up to be picked up by us, and bring them to Trent. From there, we showed them to the college that they would be staying in. We weren’t able to do this in my second year due to COVID-19. After the airport pick up, we would continue the rest of the week by leading the activities we had signed up to do. If any issues arose, then we would help resolve them, and even help our teammates when needed. We will be participating in multiple activities and team bonding activities with our students, so they felt safe and included. In my second year when covid was happening, we did online activities for these students. We held the activities throughout the day, and repeated them more than once so that people in different time zones could still participate in everything and still get a full orientation week activity. We also tried to foster an inclusive environment - both within the different colleges and among students - because we wanted to not develop any challenges, unfriendly competition, or hatred among the colleges and students. This was because those things were not what we believed in as a community, and we would deal with it effectively and kindly whenever it showed up.